Website2 min read

The top priority and focus for Gain Compliance over the past year has been product development. If we don’t design and build a product that customers want, we are not going to make it as a company. Full stop.

Through this lens, everything else is secondary.

This isn’t to say that we ignore all other parts of the organization. Just sometimes. And, time and resource permitting, we ultimately do get around to the non-product aspects of the company. Marketing in general, and our website in particular, is one example of recent focus.

So, first and foremost, check out our new website. It even includes a new listing and presentation of all of our blog posts. I’ll continue my blog on Medium, but the home for all content (including other articles, posts, and other resources) will now be our site.

As with all else, the cardinal rule of updating the website was that any effort could only be minimally disruptive to the company. Accordingly, the task fell to the person who is least involved in product development – me. This is logical, because, of the entire team, I’m the one who can’t write code. This is also just a bit ironic, because updating the website requires a level of technical expertise that I (uniquely) don’t have.

The last time I did something similar was in 2006 – I learned enough code to write a very simple program to prototype a straightforward application for my startup at the time. I spent a weekend at my desk with a book – Teach Yourself Visual Basic 6 in 24 Hours – on my lap. To make a long story short, I never learned progressed enough to become competent, but I did pull off assignment.

This go-round, it was a ton easier. First of all, there are really mature frameworks for website development which are far more welcoming to an absolute beginner. Secondarily, with web-based help – notably including great YouTube videos – the required information was so much easier to obtain. Third, I cheated: after I prototyped the website, I got the experts at Rippke Design to fix my mistakes, apply a level of polish, and improve the actual end-product to something that bears only a faint resemblance to my initial effort.

As with all that we do at Gain Compliance, the strategy is to launch and improve. So, we’ll be refining both the content and design continually. Stay tuned.